


from the mouths of liars

by unheroics



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Biology, Body Horror, Other, Under-negotiated Kink, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-25
Updated: 2017-01-25
Packaged: 2018-09-19 22:26:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9462965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unheroics/pseuds/unheroics
Summary: “Dude,” says Lance — foolishly, because it means he has to breathe and now if they get sucked out into the vacuum of space, he’ll suffocate — “Are you mutating? Is this going to be the kind of deal where you get all messed up and turn into a horrible monster?”





	

**Author's Note:**

> To everyone who encouraged me to write this: reading it should be punishment enough. Enjoy. I'll see you in hell.
> 
> Content warning: there is a truckload of body horror and xeno weirdness, including someone getting railed by a prehensile tail. If that doesn't appeal to you, back out now.

**i.**

The weirdest thing is that it starts out normal.

Lance doesn’t have the means or opportunity to classify the changes: they happen over a span of time short enough to be distracting, long enough to be gradual instead of a shock. Put a frog in scalding water, and it will freak. Ever seen a tiny amphibian with murder in its tiny amphibian eyes?

It starts out normal, and then gets progressively weirder, and by the time he should be hightailing it in the opposite direction he’s in so deep the only feeling left is that of quicksand closing around his lungs inch by merciless inch. In this scenario, in the boiling scenario, he’s the frog. He’s the one put to a slow boil.

To follow the metaphor, he’s not sure what that makes Keith. The pot, the person turning up the heat. Or the scalding water.

 

**ii.**

After the first time it happens, Keith says, “C’mon, move, you’re not staying here,” which is such a relief — to know that they’re on the same page, and it won’t turn into anything horrifying and awkward — that Lance could kiss him.

“What,” he says, pulling his pants up despite the way it makes the chilled come on his thighs peel off in dry flakes, “did you think I’d want to cuddle? We’d hug and braid each other’s hair and sing kumbaya? I’d rather shove a cactus up my —”

“Keep talking and I’ll arrange that.”

Lance gives him the finger. He takes one more moment to catalogue the picture before him, Keith naked and unashamed as he’s spread on his cot with limbs thrown haphazardly without grace or decorum, the curious paradox of gooseflesh over his forearms and the dark flush still clinging to the ridges of collar bone. They’d jerked each other off roughly, because when it isn’t about feelings and other assorted horrors, you don’t have to care about making it very good for the other person. It shows in stark fingerprint bruises over Keith’s skin, that absence of care.

Lance doesn’t commit this to memory out of misguided sentimentality, but for future reference, for when he’s alone and bored and his right hand is the one thing standing between him and oblivion.

It’s a good picture to keep. He frames it, in his head, like a cinematographer framing a scene. Click goes the camera shutter.

Keith keeps staring at him, down the length of his nose, a feat and a half given that he’s still lying down and Lance could, with the barest hint of effort, loom. Keith keeps staring at him like someone waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“I’ll see ya, space boy,” says Lance, and doesn’t let the hatch to Keith’s quarters slide all the way shut, just to piss him off.

 

**iii.**

“You’re gonna have to ask,” says Lance, because he can, and it’s gratifying to see Keith wrench himself into an emotional equivalent of a pretzel with how much he doesn’t want to talk about what it is he’s asking for, what it is he wants.

“Forget it.”

“Okay,” says Lance, and turns to leave. They’re in his quarters this time, the bulkheads comforting and familiar, with the faintest trace of vibration in the deck from the force necessary for the ship to keep moving through vacuum. But Lance can find places to be, if he needs to make a quick retreat. Somewhere, Blue is sleeping its deadened mechanised sleep, maybe dreaming of electric sheep.

“ _Lance_.”

Lance turns back around. “You have got to make up your mind, dude.” He stands with his feet shoulder-width apart, hands on his hips in a gesture that has on several occasions prompted Hunk to say makes him look like a huge queen. “It’s either this or that. I’m all accommodating and generous, let that be known for the record, but you have to _ask_.”

Keith is sitting on Lance’s cot. His knees are spread, elbows on his thighs but not quite defensive, and he’s not hard, but he could be. He could be. They could be doing infinitely more interesting things than standing here arguing; Lance barely remembers what kind of point he had been trying to make in the first place. He stands his ground.

“Can you just — come here,” says Keith. It’s pulled out of his mouth like something distasteful.

“Magic word.”

Keith scowls. “Come here before I punch you in the throat.”

“Those are exactly the magic words I meant.” Lance takes three measured steps forward, until the distance between them is such that, were he to drop into a crouch, their knees would touch. No closer. “What now?”

Say it, he thinks. Say ‘blow me.’ Lance is going to do it anyway, but he’d like to get some amusement out of the arrangement first, before he gets the sore knees and the mouth full of spunk.

Keith grabs his wrist, so quickly that there is no time for Lance to back up, back away. He freezes. Keith’s nails, blunt and bitten, dig into the space between the tendons of Lance’s wrist, the place where it hurts most; his eyes are very dark. His breathing is shallow.

“Get down on your knees,” he says, not the exact words that Lance wanted to really get the trashy, filthy vibe going, but close enough.

Lance gets down on his knees. Keith shifts his grip, from Lance’s wrist to the back of his neck, where Lance feels every papillary line pressed to his skin, the outline of Keith’s palm, colder than his own; Keith always runs colder. Later, this will occur to Lance as significant: the Galra are ectothermic, like reptiles or amphibians, relying on environmental heat sources to keep them warm. Then there’s the scratch of Keith’s bitten nails, unmindful when they break skin, and Lance forgets all about cold alien physiology.

It might not be a masterpiece, this rushed blowjob with as little eye contact as possible, but there’s nothing weird about it, it’s normal.

 

**iv.**

The third time, Keith holds him down to the deck, face mashed into cold alloys. It isn’t as exciting as it goddamned sounds.

He holds both of Lance’s wrists in one hand, gripping too hard to be comfortable and right at the knife’s edge of the kind of pain that would kill the mood, but never quite crossing it. It reminds Lance of all the times he’d ended up with his hands behind his back held in zip ties, in rope, in weird organic tendrils slick with brine. Token pilot to be taken captive and tied up.

When Keith reaches around to wrap sweaty fingers around Lance’s dick, it takes about four strokes before Lance is coming harder than he’d come in — ever. He’s shaking apart with it, lightheaded in the aftermath, Keith’s hand still on him, as if waiting for another response than the one Lance already had. Cold hands and the noises he’s making, biting down on the ridge of Lance’s spine, long gone soft between Lance’s thighs, all that cooling sweat.

“Enough,” Lance moans into the deck, breath misting wetly on metal. “Enough, stop.”

A beat. Another.

Keith stops.

“Are you okay?” he asks. It’s the one thing he needs to ask to make sure that Lance will never tell him if he isn’t.

“Just let me up, you control freak, _ow_.”

Keith lets him up. He turns Lance around, until they sit facing each other, both naked from the waist down and both of them still breathing harshly with exertion, and rubs at the abused flesh of Lance’s wrists until colour returns to them. Too much of it bleeds into the fine, red imprints of his fingers, so that the marks stand out, dark and discoloured. He tells Lance to flex his hands. Lance flexes his hands.

He’s still lightheaded. Can you get this fucked-out from someone coming between your thighs and a handjob? Maybe you can. After Lance stands up, cracks his hips and his back and tilts his head to both sides until the vertebrae of his neck pop and he truly is fine, he doesn’t pull the hatch all the way shut.

 

**v.**

Nothing really changes with the revelation that Keith is — what he is. Nothing but the obvious, and the less obvious, and some things in between; but mostly those things remain the same. Just skewed very slightly out of alignment. Tilted. From ‘right’ to something else.

They still almost die, with alarming regularity.

They still let off the excess of adrenaline when no one is looking: open a vein and bask in whatever comes out, always salty, be it blood or tears or come. Like furtive nocturnal creatures that would turn to dust at the first touch of sunlight. The ship never gets closer to a sun than is strictly necessary, anyway; Altean technology is vulnerable to solar flares and ion storms.

Lance is the first to notice, or the first, at least, to mention that Keith doesn’t blink as often. It’s a gradual change. Then the ship sticks them in an airlock after a training exercise, and in the five minutes during which Lance desperately repeats to himself the procedure for surviving in vacuum in case they get spaced — curl up into a ball, shut your eyes tightly so they don’t leak out of the sockets, exhale and exhale until there is no air left in your lungs that could give you a pulmonary embolism — in those five minutes, he notices.

In the half-dark of the airlock, reflecting the emergency lights blaring warning messages across the display screen in Altean that is of no help at all, Keith’s eyes flash yellow. He’s not blinking.

“Dude,” says Lance — foolishly, because it means he has to breathe and now if they get sucked out into the vacuum of space, he’ll suffocate — “Are you mutating? Is this going to be the kind of deal where you get all messed up and turn into a horrible monster?”

Keith turns to him. When they aren’t naked, there are always at least three feet of distance between them. “What are you talking about?”

“Your furry purple alien side is showing.” When Keith doesn’t react, Lance gestures at his face. “Yellow eyes! It’s freaky!”

Keith blinks, with careful deliberation, and his eyes go back to normal.

But the memory stays with Lance, keeps him wondering, worrying at the thought like a dog worries at a bone, and after the next time they almost-but-not-quite die and Keith storms into his quarters, the hatch sliding shut behind him, to pick a fight with Lance that will end in one or both of them coming their brains out, Lance kisses him.

It’s the best idea he has of getting up close and personal, of getting a good look at Keith’s face, and only belatedly does it occur to him that they’ve never done that. Kissing, though that’s a generous word for it. Mostly what Lance does is get a firm handful of the front of Keith’s shirt and shove his tongue down Keith’s throat and, as Lance suspected he might, Keith keeps his eyes open.

It’s like a glaze. A thin film of something slick and organic, reflective with a yellow cast. Oh, Lance thinks: that’s what it is. Like benthic fish.

He pulls away, not even registering whether the kiss was good or bad, only that Keith a little grudgingly kissed back. It should worry him more that Keith’s tongue is rougher than his own, a little sandpaper-y. Maybe now that Keith knows what he is, his body has given itself recourse to change.

“I was right,” Lance says, and adds, in the interest of completeness, “and you were wrong. You’re mutating.”

“This shit again,” says Keith, with an irritated huff, but his breathing is uneven.

“Did you notice you have adipose eyelids?”

“What?”

“Like deep sea fish. Jeez, what are the Galra even like, in terms of —” Lance waves his hands, indistinct. “— biology or whatever. If you grow gills, I’m calling it quits.”

“I won’t grow gills,” says Keith. He gets into Lance’s space again, freaky eyes and all, nostrils flaring as if he can smell something that Lance can’t. He shoves Lance into the bulkhead and follows, until they are crowded together, and the inch or two that Lance has on him doesn’t matter. Keith, the rangy little prick, can use his height to an advantage. “You wanna do this, or not?”

“I always want to do this.” The words tumble out of Lance’s mouth while his hands are working at the buttons of Keith’s trousers. “It’s like you don’t know me at all. Ready to go, any time.”

“One thing you’re good for, at least,” Keith mutters. He mirrors Lance’s fumbling, soaking up Lance’s heat, and Lance’s focus keeps straying to his eyes. They really did get a bit yellow. Whether it’s optical illusion or not, he can’t make himself look away. The worst part is that if there really were gills involved, he still probably wouldn’t call it quits.

Keith wraps cold, dry fingers around his dick without bothering to ease the way, even with spit. It’s a little horrible until Lance’s own sweat alleviates the pain of friction, and then it’s like having a family of eels bringing him off, weird but good and enough that Lance’s own hand slips and stutters until Keith growls at him. Then it’s good. They’re in each other’s faces, gasping wetly all over each other’s skin; no more kissing, but that’s probably better. Kissing is boring.

Afterwards Lance brings his hand up to his face before he gets washed up, out of morbid curiosity. The smell is different. Like brackish water and brine, like the slippery inner parts of a clamshell.

Definitely wouldn’t call it quits.

 

**vi.**

That it happens in stages is why Lance never stops to wonder at what else it might mean, to be casually fooling around with someone whose DNA comes in part from a bizarre space catlizard.

He bends Keith over his cot, the lights at a comfortable twenty percent, the slap of sweaty skin on skin as he snaps his hips forward and fucks Keith’s thighs almost all he can hear above the rush of blood in his ears. It’s fine. He’s got it all under control.

The other thing he can hear is the noises Keith is making, like a gutted animal, low-pitched and needy. It’s new to see him like this, head twisted sideways and pressed into the cot. The mindless, feline arch of his back and the way that his teeth leave white welts in his lower lip, as if shutting his mouth would help save his dignity. None of it is dignified. Who cares about dignified.

Lance drops his forehead to the cold, sticky skin between the jut of Keith’s shoulder blades and gives him a reach-around only to find Keith already taking care of business, working himself at a punishing pace. And just like that, Lance is finished, he’s done.

His spine feels as if it’s made of jelly when Keith shoves him off and away. The deck is hard at his back, and Lance goes sprawling. Keith clambers into his lap and jerks off on Lance’s stomach, while Lance watches, dazed, able only to lie back and take it. Keith’s knees dig into his thighs, Keith’s free hand claws at his side, hard enough that he thinks it should register as painful, but he’s too distracted.

Keith’s pupils are compressed into vertical slits, not like a cat, not quite like a lizard, but something in-between. Lance lies there, frozen and wishing he could get hard again, and then Keith bends down to sink his teeth into the pliant flesh of Lance’s neck and Lance’s vision goes white around the edges.

He’s going to find twin incisions over his neck, later. They won’t look like an impression of human teeth, not with canines that could cut through skin so deeply and so easily. Lance doesn’t want to think about how many times he’s been marked now, orgasm-stupid and careless. His body below the neck is mottled with bruises.

But then, Keith fares no better. Doesn’t he?

 

**vii.**

The changes are gradual enough that no one seems to notice, or, alternatively, no one wants to call attention to it. It’s not Keith’s fault; it isn’t as though he can help it, and no one wants to kick him while he’s down.

The reflexes come in useful. As does the way he can see in the dark, and the ectothermy that means, when they get stranded for a week on a planet with a wide plethora of ice biomes and not much else, Keith is the only one who can reliably work on their lions’ repairs without freezing to death.

The rest of it, Lance thinks privately, just goes to make Keith more interesting. The teeth. The saltier, more acrid smell of his sweat that Lance might be the only one to actually pay attention to, but oh, pay attention he does. The slowly changing texture of Keith’s skin, drier and oddly amorphous from how seamlessly it adapts to ambient temperatures. The discolouration spreading outward from Keith’s torso in a splintering of vein-like tendrils, crawling to his extremities while the outer layer of skin cracks and peels around it, that Lance tries not to look at too closely, for fear of finding it too nauseating, or somehow awful to the touch. Like a snake shedding skin. Lance tries not to wonder what will happen once the spiderweb of bluish filaments covers Keith completely.

The mild undercurrent of personality shift, but Keith has always been a scrawny, angry, hot-headed weirdo. The entire Galra thing just makes his fuse that little bit shorter.

Lance has stopped counting the bruises. He has a whole cartography, and he tries to pay back in kind, unwilling to be made to seem fragile in comparison, but the truth is that he’s the one to regularly have his face mashed into the deck and his arm, or arms, wrenched behind his back. Everything gradual, so he doesn’t pay it any heed until it’s too late, and he’s on his knees again. And again. And again. With a mouth full of cloying, viscous fluid that is less and less like spunk.

Then there is the tail. The tail is — strange. Incongruous.

Intriguing.

Lance doesn’t remember ever seeing Galra with tails, but as Coran tries to explain, “We already had reason to think Keith’s mother was genetically engineered — it isn’t actually possible for a Galra and a human to, well, pardon the language; to breed. Just because the anatomies are compatible —”

“Oh, god, please don’t.” Lance, in abject horror, feels that he speaks for the whole group when he says, “Stop. I don’t want to think about Keith’s parents doing it. Please.”

Seated on the deck with one knee pulled up to his chest, similarly horrified, Keith doesn’t seem to notice that the very tip of the tail in question is twitching. It lies coiled next to his other leg. It isn’t the pallid, bleached shade of violet that Galra get. It’s the colour of his hair, even though it doesn’t look very furry, and it tends to wrap around one of his legs as he walks, since he doesn’t need it to balance his centre of gravity — yet. Not exactly feline and not exactly reptilian. Not amphibian, either.

Lance has to settle with the idea that Keith is, by now, a breed of his own.

 

**viii.**

In a fruitless bid for distraction, he makes out with an alien babe, who is probably not a babe, given that its species doesn’t seem to have sexual dimorphism.

What the space presumed-babe does have is a long, prehensile tongue with what feel like tiny suction cups all along its underside. If Lance had a gag reflex he’d probably vomit, but as it is, that tongue wraps around his own and further down, until Lance thinks he might come in his pants at the delicate way it nuzzles the back of his throat. It’s maybe not the best kiss of his life, but it ranks somewhere in the top five. Top three.

Keith almost strangles him.

The blue lion is out of commission, because of course the making out is a ploy to get Lance’s defences down, and naturally it works — how could it not, with a prehensile tongue thrown into the bargain? — and so Lance has to hitch a ride with Red, and the first thing Keith does once they go into dock back aboard the ship is slam Lance into the bulkhead with one hand around his throat, fingers digging into the meat of his neck.

Lance’s mind goes blank: recedes into that dark, quiet space where Keith sometimes sends him, just by holding him down, pinning him to the deck the same way he is pinning him to the bulkhead now.

He’s shorter, but Lance’s toes barely touch the ground. He hangs halfway suspended, held immobile by the neck, and the pressure is immense. He can feel the crush of it against his larynx, removed from the sensation by guttural, animal panic.

Keith has his head bent low, as though he’s asleep on his feet, a marionette, down to his tail lying lifeless on the floor by his feet. It’s like an octopus arm removed from water, weighed down by gravity.

That’s about where it stops being normal. Fear crackles, electric, in the tips of Lance’s fingers. He doesn’t remember when Keith’s nails got so sharp, not quite claw-like, not yet, but enough to be dangerous.

Every part of this is dangerous.

Keith takes a step forward, and another, without releasing Lance by even an inch. He tilts his head sideways, still eerily mechanical. When he looks up, there’s a yellow flatness to his eyes that sends shivers down Lance’s spine, like the prickling touch of spider legs. Darkness encroaches on the edges of his vision. He’s making noises, tiny and choked, helpless.

Keith smells him. Leans forward, bending his neck in a way that can’t comfortable, or entirely natural. The twist of his spine looks agonising, and on the parts of his skin that are bared Lance can see the thin spiderweb of veins that aren’t veins, reaching down to Keith’s wrists and slinking up to cradle his throat. He inhales whatever scent it is he might be looking for on Lance’s skin. In an inexplicable atavism, Lance lifts his head, gives him better access. Bares his throat.

It’ll be fine. Keith has never hurt him more than Lance wanted him to. Struggling for air is untenable, when Lance’s feet don’t have purchase, but he can’t quite go limp, can’t make himself submit like this. Neither can he tell what hurts more: being choked, or the strain of his muscles seizing in reflexive self-defence.

Weakening by the second, he manages to lift one hand to paw feebly at the side of Keith’s head, until he catches one ear. The least decorous point of purchase, but he yanks anyway, and Keith lets out a noise that’s halfway between a hiss and a whine, tilting his head to follow the direction in which Lance pulls him.

Then his eyes clear, with arduous slowness. The yellow tinge of his irises and sclera doesn’t subside. Pupils sharpened to slits. His tail twitches at the tip, one little spasm before it curls around Keith’s ankle.

The deck meets Lance without mercy. He doesn’t even register the moment in which Keith lets him go, just drops down, deck grille harsh enough to bang up his kneecaps. He stays there on all fours, struggling for air, taking in lungfuls too quickly to be of any use. His vision is swimming, and there is a light buzzing somewhere in the back of his head, from oxygen deprivation.

“What the hell is your problem?” he demands, the anger tampered by how hoarse his voice is, barely above a rasp.

“Lance?” It’s a bad sign that Keith’s pupils are not widening back to a circular shape, to something more outwardly human. He stares at Lance as he backs away, until he hits his own pilot chair, and drops into it without a change in expression.

“No, Santa on a coke binge — of course it’s me, you freak!”

Lance keeps rubbing at the chafed, raw skin of his neck. He’s going to have a mark, one clearly visible above the collar. All of his synapses are misfiring. Maybe Keith gave him brain damage. Here is testament to the effectiveness of putting experiment subjects to a slow boil rather than immediate shock: Lance doesn’t bolt, doesn’t hightail it out of Red’s pilot compartment like anyone sane would.

Instead he tries to find the small nicks he knows must dot his neck where Keith had punctured skin, manhandling him like a thing to be used. The thought sends Lance’s mind careening into places he’d rather not visit right now, while he still can’t breathe properly. Too late. His flight suit is suddenly uncomfortable, too tight between his legs.

“I don’t,” says Keith, watching it all with wide, nearly pupil-less eyes. “What the hell.”

“That’s my line. Can I move now, or are you gonna freak out again?”

“I — yeah. I mean, no, I won’t freak out.”

So Lance lets himself crawl a little closer to the pilot chair, the glow of Red’s terminal displays throwing odd shadows over the deck, the bulkheads, everything. Illuminated like this, Keith looks nothing less than alien. He is. It’s never been more pronounced.

Lance should be running. Far, far away. His body is already mottled with bruises. There’s no way for this to end well, for either of them. Still on his hands and knees, he shifts a little closer. Slowly. It seems that Keith will levitate off the chair at the slightest provocation, he’s so tense.

“I don’t, like, care or anything,” says Lance, and tries to make his posture nonthreatening, a tiny shred of self-preservation screaming at him not to antagonise the alien hybrid with wicked sharp canines, “but wanna tell me what that was all about?”

Keith lowers his head, until he can put it in his hands, elbows on knees, and he’s still looking at Lance, but now the agony in that gaze is borne more of embarrassment than terror. His tail keeps jerking in every direction, stub end swinging like a pendulum. “You just — this is so freaking stupid. You smelled wrong.”

“And…what do I normally smell like?” Lance doesn’t want to know the answer, but the question stumbles over his tongue anyway.

“These days? Me,” says Keith, as if it’s that simple. And for whatever animal instinct that is driving him, maybe it is. Uncomplicated terms of ownership and possession. How does Lance feel about it? Not uncomplicated, that’s for sure. Keith tilts his head down, fingers digging into his scalp, fisting in his hair. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he says, smaller than Lance is comfortable hearing. “I don’t know what I’m turning into.”

“Maybe it’s Galra puberty.” The joke falls so flat, Lance winces before he’s finished speaking. “Maybe you’re just, I don’t know. Adapting. Maybe it’s always been in you, and they did something when they had you, to sort of…let it out.”

“I don’t know if I like it,” Keith whispers. He sounds scared. If there is ever a moment where Lance is close to running, this is it. They don’t do the sharing and caring. It’s so much worse than getting choked.

He doesn’t bother considering how much it costs to get a grip on himself. He’s still on the floor, has to look up, their positions acutely unsettling. Keith’s eyes are still yellow. Maybe he’s crossed an event horizon. Maybe they won’t go back.

Lance swallows once, and again for good measure, and says, “Then show me. It can’t be that bad.”

“I tried to throttle you just now.”

Lance makes himself shrug. “Well, I mean, that could be kinda hot. The territorial thing. I could be into that.” He ignores Keith’s sort of derision, and his own heart, beating wildly against his ribcage. “Just warn a guy next time. So you can, you know, show me what you’ve got that’s so awful.”

Keith tilts his head, again into that strange, unnatural bend that seems as if it might break his spine. His mouth is pressed into a thin, flat line. He sinks a little deeper into the pilot chair and the red lion seems to calm him by increments just by existing, a cold shelter of alloy and electricity.

“Lights down, thirty percent,” he says, without taking his eyes off Lance. Red obediently brings the lights down, until Keith is visible as barely more than silhouette, curious and still save for his tail, and the eyes catching every remaining speck of light and reflecting it tenfold in a yellow glare. “I see better like this. It hurts less.”

“That…I guess makes sense? All the Galra ships we’ve seen had that dark evil lair vibe.”

Keith isn’t blinking. Lance, by contrast, blinks too rapidly. It still doesn’t prepare him for the moment when Keith uncoils from the pilot chair, dropping into a crouch on the deck. Human bodies shouldn’t bend like that. It’s as if the dark has given him permission to let go of those vestiges of personable demeanour that Lance hadn’t noticed before, not until they are gone. But it’s Lance who gave him permission. He tries to remember that he’s wanted this. Wants it.

There’s something wrong with Keith’s centre of gravity. He moves bent forward slightly, tail thrust back for balance, but maybe it’s comfortable. Maybe it’s how he is meant to move. Jerky and a little skittering. Not feline at all.

He drops back down into a squat in front of Lance, tail sweeping over the deck, back and forth, hypnotic. Lance’s hands are itching with how much he wants to touch it, still it, feel it move over his skin.

It’s not as difficult to remember that he wants this, up close. With that saltwater and ozone smell on him, the feeling of Keith like no one else, because he doesn’t exude heat the way people do, just soaks it without giving back.

“Okay,” says Keith, and nods, and makes a dive for the catches of Lance’s flight suit.

It’s never been like this, but Lance can roll with a punch. Even if it hurts when Keith’s nails scrape over already-bruised skin, every abrasion the work of his fingers and teeth. He’s so cool to the touch. Lance decides he should stop thinking, otherwise he’ll get nauseous, either with nerves or revulsion, he’s not sure.

By now they have the routine down pat, peeling out of their flight suits to reveal clothes and the living tissue beneath. Keith, shorter though he might be, ends up crowding Lance into the corner between deck and bulkhead at an uneasy angle, forcing Lance to spread his knees to accommodate the space Keith takes up. The routine might be the same, but it’s different, to be doing this in the confines of Keith’s lion.

Red would take Keith’s side, if something went wrong, of that Lance is certain.

But he asked for this. Too late to back out now.

Keith’s tail snakes beneath the hem of Lance’s pants as soon as his flight suit is off and Lance almost screams right then. He clamps his mouth shut and shudders at the feeling of something cold and smooth rubbing against the skin of his ankle, realising that the odd fur-like impression is all wrong. The tail is dry and scaly like a lizard’s.

Lance grabs it. It’s not his first mistake that day.

He can’t tell whether it’s pain or pleasure flitting over Keith’s face. All he knows is the snarl that twists his mouth, knows it intimately: it always precedes something violent, something unsafe. Keith flattens his palm against Lance’s throat, and closes his fist, finger by finger, pushing Lance’s chin up.

Oh, Lance thinks, despite the budding fear. Oh, it is on, asshole.

He gives the tail an experimental stroke, then another, down its length to the blunt end. Scales graze his hand each time he angles it upward, and maybe it isn’t that different to any of the times he’d given Keith a regular old handjob — so mundane, now, in comparison — but different enough. Keith is hissing curses through clenched teeth, unseeing eyes too wide, and keeps pressing down on Lance’s trachea.

With the breath choked out of him Lance can’t ask if it’s good, but it must be. It could be better if he just —

He takes his hand away and Keith lets out a sharp, keening noise. Lance shoves his hand in Keith’s face.

“Lick,” he orders. It hurts to speak, and his voice comes out a garbled mess. But Keith gets the meaning, and obeys, and drags his scratchy tongue over the inside of Lance’s palm. It’s a little revolting when Lance takes his tail in hand again, wet with saliva, but it’s the kind of disgust he could never look away from, morbidly curious to the very last despite how much he would like to retch.

Wetter it should be even more like touching Keith’s dick, except his tail is colder and as long as his legs, and keeps moving to fit better in Lance’s hand, like a happy, eager animal. By the time the first jolts of sensation pass and Keith can react without being ordered, Lance almost doesn’t entirely feel like puking. It doesn’t detract from how hard he is, and what a relief it is when Keith finally touches him with one cold hand, the other still pressed to Lance’s neck, pinning him by the most vulnerable parts of his body.

Lance can’t stop thinking about sharp nails and sharper teeth.

If he had any doubts about whether Keith has accurate nerve relay from his tail, they die when he realises that the slide of Keith’s hand over his dick matches the rhythm of Lance jerking him off. Which is probably what he’s doing.

When his hand is high enough, every time, the tip of the tail curls around his wrist, slippery now, leaving damp residue.

It’s not how saliva should behave. It should start drying, fading until Lance’s skin chafed against scales again, but it doesn’t. He can’t focus enough to think about it in more than passing alarm.

Keith slips his tail from Lance’s grip and forces him down, using the hold he has on Lance’s throat, down, down the bulkhead until Lance is flat on the deck. They tug and pull at the remainder of one another’s clothes.

There should be words spoken, but what would they be? There are no words for it, or precedent.

“Okay, okay,” Lance finds himself saying despite that, on breathless exhales, feigning bravado and laughter that ring hollow to his ears, “just do it. I’m ready, ravish me.”

Keith pauses long enough to tilt his head back, look down, then up again. “It’s probably gonna hurt.”

Like most of their sex hadn’t? “I’ll lie back and think of England. C’mon.”

Keith clamps his hand over Lance’s mouth, pushing hard enough that the deck grille at the back of Lance’s head digs into his skull. He thrashes, a little, perfunctorily; it will be a success if he manages to weaken Keith’s hold, even a little, but he doesn’t have much hope.

He freezes, goes absolutely still, when he feels Keith’s tail brush his inner thighs. Cold, mostly, save for the places where Lance had warmed it through friction if nothing else, still slippery. That can’t be natural. It can’t be normal.

Did they agree do this? Did Lance agree? He can’t remember. And he wants it. Right? He forces his thighs to fall open, as far as they’ll go.

Keith doesn’t let up, keeps scraping his tail over the skin of Lance’s thighs, circling lower. It’s not idle. It’s purposeful. And then Lance stops thinking, crashes into some previously unknown mental block, at the feeling of something strange and cold and alien entering him. He almost balks. He wants to puke, but doesn’t. The tail moves inside him, back and forth, slowly, curious and inquisitive.

It doesn’t hurt that much. Or rather: it hurts less than what Lance had already done, had done to him, what they’d done together. There’s the ache of stretch and the feeling of something not-right in him, forcing his body to adjust and mould around it, the blunt pressure such that he finds his lungs struggling to expand. Poised on the razor’s edge of too much.

Keith has another three feet of tail, and the thought of it makes Lance want to gag, and pull his legs open wider, both at once. His own sweat makes him slip over the deck grille.

“Holy shit,” Keith manages. There are no pupils left to split his eyes into halves, and it makes him look blind, like a nighttime animal going by touch alone. At any other time, Lance would mock him for how thin his voice is. He can’t, not with Keith’s hand clamped tight over his mouth. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to speak even if he were free to do it.

He finds anchorage in Keith’s back, fingers fitting into the hollows between the ribs, beneath the wings of shoulder blades, and he feels the difference in texture between Keith’s old skin and whatever is taking him over from the inside, those threads and tendrils of alien flesh drifting to the surface. He doesn’t grip too hard, for fear that the skin might peel clean off; that Keith really will moult it.

Lance doesn’t want to look. He’s determined to see it through, no visceral feeling of wrongness enough to make him back out, but he can’t make himself focus on details. Keith reaches between them again, to take them both in hand, spilling small hitching breaths at whatever it feels like to him, the touch of his own cold hand. The scales covering his tail scratch and scrape inside Lance going in, flaring, then slide easily out. It’s like some macabre pavlovian conditioning that he can be hard for this.

He knows he won’t last long, fucked and fucking Keith’s hand at once, there isn’t enough of him to accommodate the strain — and just as he thinks it, Keith takes his other hand, the one over Lance’s mouth, sliding his fingers over the seam of Lance’s lips until they open.

Whatever it is that Keith says, and he does say something, is intelligible against Lance’s neck. Lance takes three fingers, as far as they will go, nails nicking the soft palate, pressing down over his tongue. Keith’s fingers, even slick with sweat and then Lance’s spit, are only as warm as Lance’s own body heat will make them. At the start — a moment punctuated with the slide and creak of sweat-damp skin on the deck, their uneven breaths — they’re just cold and slippery and too much, inside and out.

Then it’s like a switch going off, and it’s better. Bearable. Lance had worse in his mouth, by now.

He arches his hips, just so, to give more instead of just taking, and sees stars when Keith’s tail twists inside him, seeking purchase. He does it again, and again, a third time; loses count. But it’s what makes Keith start to lose it, that arch, the movement of his hand staggering as he squeezes too harshly, but it’s what Lance needs to follow him over the edge.

Sensation returns in waves, and the first thing he feels is absolutely revolting: Keith slips his tail out of him, and it leaves Lance oddly unsatisfied, despite the orgasm, and its evidence splattered over both of their stomachs, two textures and two consistencies, but maybe Lance should count his blessings. At least Keith’s come isn’t cephalopod ink, or something. Not that, at this point, Lance would mind much.

He shifts, winces in pain, and thinks: more lube next time. Any lube next time. He hurts in more places than he doesn’t.

“Holy shit,” says Keith, far hoarser than last time. “Are you —?”

Lance wipes his mouth with the back of one hand, tries to move his jaw; the hinge creaks. “Sort of. Ow. Yeah, I’m fine. Holy shit.”

“Yeah. I know.” Keith seems to be looking down, to the sides, away. But it’s difficult to tell, without pupils or irises. He tilts his head in reluctant curiosity. “It wasn’t…I mean. That wasn’t too gross, right?”

“It was the vilest thing anyone’s ever done to my virgin body,” Lance says, raw and thready, grinning so widely it makes his mouth hurt even more than it already does. “Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again _yesterday_.”

For a second, Keith is absolutely still. It lasts a beat, two. His tail twitches, and Lance won’t ever be able to look at it in the field without thinking of spit roasts. Then Keith nods, and his shoulders slump, and his expression is the one he usually wears when he finds something that Lance said funny, but wouldn’t admit to it under pain of torture.

“You’re not a virgin. I’d know, I was there.”

“Wait, you think you were my first? That’s so sweet.”

“Like anyone else would touch that with a ten foot pole,” says Keith, bristling. He shakes his head, and pushes sweaty hair out of his eyes. “Now get out of my lion, you’re dripping on the deck.”

There is no reason for Lance to stay, so he starts collecting his discarded clothes and flight suit. On his way out, to hide that he’s limping rather obviously, he blows Keith a kiss, theatrical and exaggerated, and doesn’t pull the front hatch all the way shut, just to piss him off.

 

**ix.**

Once he’s back in his own quarters, Lance very studiously doesn’t look in any mirror.

What would be the point? It’s too late to back out. What they don’t tell you about bringing frogs to a slow boil, is that by the end they probably like it.


End file.
